Samsung has become the first netbook maker to unveil a machine based on VIA's Nano processor - as predicted.
Samsung NC20 Samsung's NC20: VIA Nano on board
VIA has often said the Nano is aimed at full-size laptops, leaving the new chip's predecessor, the C7-M, for netbooks, and to be fair, the Samsung NC20 - follow-up to the …

Pricing

The NC20 is available at around the £380 mark from a number of sites, amazon and Dixons being two examples.

I definitely want to see legitimate benchmarks on this puppy though as the £60 difference in price between the NC10 and NC20 would be worth it if the Chrome chipset will handle a bit more than the GMA950. HD video at 1280 x 800 would definitely be a nice thing to have from something that small.

Rubbish graphics/battery life

Apparently, from a personal review written by a normal person, the graphics chip in the NC20 is atrocious. The battery life is also not particularly good. The NC10 could really operate for over 6 hours with WiFi on, and general use. With the NC20 it sounds as if it's good for about 4 hours or so, which is quite a bit less

I suppose we'll have to decide upon the NC20 when more people have bought this model but from what I've heard thus far it's really not all that great. Then again, as mentioned, it's a notebook pretty much, not a netbook, given the screen size.

The NC10 'special edition' will be out soon, think personally I'd prefer that over the NC20, unless the screen resolution of 1024xXXX is not suitable for an application I relied upon.

Congratulations!

Clearly stung by the scathing comments on your review of the NC10, which was so late that the machine was almost out of production by the time the review appeared, you have done a mini-review of the NC20 almost before it is on sale!

Looking forward to the real review when you actually get one to play with...

Shiny screen?

@ HD Capable

You're missing the point, even if it had enough pixels at 12" screen size to display HD res., you'd not be able to discriminate that much detail at that pixel pitch.

What is instead important, is that it have the hardware accelerated ability to run HD video resolutions realtime, then resampled to native screen resolution, so you're not re-encoding everything to a lower resolution just to get it to play on your netbook-performance-level ultraportable.

the problem with netbooks

is that they look like small notebooks.

I suspect most people would be happier with a 13" notebook.

Maybe we just need a physical switch to turn off power-hungry devices - 3d graphics, higher-res screens (go from 1280x1024 to 1024x768 or 640x480), slow the disks down, in order to get netbook battery-life from better devices.

I know it isn't a small, cheap computer anymore. I haven't missed the point, I just suspect the real market for netbooks is smaller than people think. A higher price is better than a disappointed customer.

@ AC 'Congratulations'

Either you read the wrong review, have a very warped understanding of the English language, or skimmed the article so much you only saw the very minor negative comments. How can a review scoring 90% and closing with a comment 'All hail the new netbook champ' be scathing?!

Hooray, a higher-resolution display at last!

At last, a netbook with a higher-res display and XP. The significance is that Microsoft must have been persuaded to stop trying to cripple or kill off the sector by restricting the hardware on which they'll supply XP. At least with respect to the display resolution.

As for this hardware, I think it's too heavy. Others may think it's too big. What I really want is for someone to back-port the higher-res screen to a 10-inch model, ideally weighing in under a kilo but 1.25kg will do.